We are happy to start a testing phase for our new traffic and daytime dependent optimization.

To consider traffic within the optimization, you just need to specify the following:

"configuration":{
"routing":{
"consider_traffic": true
}
}

Note that the optimization is daytime-dependent now, i.e. it is important to specify all time-related fields in seconds since Jan 01 1970 (UTC). Along with the coordinates, it is then internally converted into UTC date time with offset (e.g. "2017-09-18T10:12+02:00"). For example, if you want to let your vehicle start today, 18.09., 11am and you are located in Berlin (UTC date time with offset: "2017-09-18T11:00+02:00") find the according unix timestamp and put it in your vehicle specification like this:

To illustrate what this actually means, let us assume we have a single driver who needs to deliver 4 items to customers in London. It starts from the airport London Heathrow.

Our current Optimization API calculates that this delivery tour will take 154min no matter whether the driver starts at 3am, 7am, 1pm or 6pm. It is an average value over the entire day. De facto, travel time varies significantly throughout the day so that it actually does matter when the driver starts. Our new time dependent optimization takes this into account and returns the following travel times depending on the vehicle's departure time:

We extended it not only because of the options to integrate more data providers, but also to provide users the option to solve their problems with free-flow travel times. For example, if one wants to activate TomTom's free-flow data, specify it as follows:

I assume you mean open sourcing the changes to jsprit? There are no plans to do so (read here a bit about our open vs. closed 'strategy'). Still keep in mind that the majority of work was to get the (proprietary) data into the routing engine and handle a very big deployment of the routing engine. So not much that would make sense to open source, there is just too few open traffic data.

Sounds really great! I understand from the anouncement and examples that it applies to route optimization. Is it - or is it going to be - available to the Routing API? This would be a tremendous improvement.